I spent five years trying to prove I wasn’t a ghost. I succeeded. But by the time the world finally saw me, I had forgotten how to see myself.
Five Years of Total Concentration
In 2020, I was rejected. It was personal. It hurt. But it did something else, too. It opened my eyes. I realized I was just a random person in a crowded world. I was invisible. I decided, right then, that I would never be invisible again. I wanted to be undeniable.
I locked my door. I disappeared.
For two years, I lived inside a game engine. Coding was a playground back then. It was pure. It was an escape. I wasn’t just building games; I was building a version of myself that didn’t need anyone else. I spent months on shaders. I obsessed over moon simulations. I was lost in the math of reality.
In 2022, I joined college. My first year wasn’t about the fests. It wasn’t about making friends. It was about my own projects. I built my own programming language in C++. It was fast. While others were struggling with basic syntax, I was designing an interpreter. I stopped being a student. I became a builder.
Then, the rhythm changed. The “Machine” took over.
December 2023 was my first major win at a national hackathon. That was the spark. By February 2024, I was in a state of total concentration. I won a hackathon every single weekend. Four weeks. Four trophies. I was moving at a pace that left people breathless.
But in May 2024, the weight of that speed finally cracked the team.
We had to remove one person. Another left shortly after. It was messy. The worst part was that they took our code with them. They took our data and our hard work to start a rival team. Suddenly, we weren’t just competing against the world; we were competing against our own shadows. Shivers. It was a cold, heavy realization.
But code is just a snapshot. It is a ghost of where we used to be. We were the ones who could improve, while they were stuck with what we had already built. We evolved. They didn’t. We beat them anyway.
The wins kept coming. The work got deeper.
I wrote books. I published software packages. I won again at the national level. In the summer of 2025, I interned at a fintech startup. I built real-time monitoring systems for them. They liked my work. They offered me a full-time job.
I said no.
I was still chasing the peak. October 2025 was placement season. I interviewed with a major international bank. Then I waited. One month of silence passed. During that month, another company came to campus. They moved fast. They offered me a job. I took it. I was officially “placed.”
Then the truth came out. The bank finally reached out; they wanted me. But the college administration stepped in. Because I was already placed at the other company, they told the bank no. They didn’t ask me. They didn’t care about what I wanted. They just closed the door on my behalf. Five years of work, and I was still just a checkbox on a spreadsheet.
By December 2025, I reached the peak. I became the lead for an AI project at a top startup accelerator. I had made it. I wasn’t a random person anymore.
But I don’t recommend this.
I burned five years of my youth to prove a point to a world that doesn’t care about the fire. I lost the social skills that make life worth living. I stayed in my room until the fire to prove myself was the only thing keeping me warm. I won the trophies, but I lost the ability to just exist.
The New Rule
2026 is about reclaiming my humanity.
I am done being a utility. For years, I was a problem-solving machine that didn’t need a social life. If you had a bug, you called me. If you had a quest, I was the one who finished it. That version of me is dead.
My new rule is simple: be more human, and be more mean.
Being “mean” isn’t about being a jerk. It’s about boundaries. It’s about saying “no” to people who only value me for my output. ChatGPT is free; my time is not.
I finally proved I’m not a ghost. Now, I’m going to find out if I’m any good at being a person. The screen is off. The door is open. I’m going to live.
